


I'm Ready To Be Amazed

by Sadtrashwitch



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-23
Updated: 2020-05-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:41:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24340753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sadtrashwitch/pseuds/Sadtrashwitch
Summary: Charlie has known his whole life he would take over the familyv restaurant one day... It was supposed to be after college, and he certainly wasn't supposed to fall in love with another employee
Relationships: Charlie McAvoy/David Pastrnak
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4
Collections: Pucking Rare - A Hockey Rarepair Challenge





	I'm Ready To Be Amazed

Charlie had been around the restaurant for as long as he could remember. Hell, he’d been there from the time he could walk. Some of his earliest memories were toddling around the dining room and entertaining their customers with his rendition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ any time it played on the sound system. His great-grandfather had started the surf and turf restaurant, and it had passed down along the men in his paternal line ever since. His father had taken over from his grandfather completely by the time Charlie was 12 years old, and Charlie had been helping out around the place ever since. 

Originally it was small things like taking out the trash, but Charlie had worked his way up to manager of the waitstaff in the ten years since he’d started, and he had had the pleasure of working with a variety of people in the intervening years. None of them had been as deeply interesting, and equally as concerning, as David. 

David was about a year older than Charlie, and he had moved to the area to attend a local college, where he was studying to be a nurse. Generally speaking, people were always shocked when they found out what David was studying, but Charlie knew the Czech man was well suited for it. He was outgoing, always talking and moving, his hands a flurry as he gestured wildly during his stories to patrons. Everyone was always laughing along with him, and everything seemed like it was a joke to David. Charlie had known him for three years now, and they had been three years spent envying the ease that he had with people. 

He was often in awe of David, though he tried not to show it. It always felt like he was a half a step behind the other, though, like David maybe knew more about something than Charlie did. A smile always played at the corner of his lips as he would call for Charlie’s help, or attention, and in the first year of knowing him that had been often. Charlie had helped David navigate learning the processes of the restaurant, and had helped him to hone his English as well as he could. Charlie didn’t claim to be perfect at it himself, often joking about how awful his own grammar was and the irony of trying to help David fix his. 

By the end of the year, Charlie had felt more comfortable with David, but he had never felt like he had caught up… The exhilaration of that was something that Charlie found sometimes knocked the wind out of him. He never quite thought more deeply than that about it, always leaving it as a strange amorphous feeling in the back of his mind that was better left there. He didn’t have time for that, he was training to take over the restaurant afterall, and trying to prove to his father that he was able and worth it. 

On that particularly strange night, Charlie had both been kicked in the shins, and knocked in the face by a waitress carrying a tray as he’d been doubled over trying to examine the damage to said shins. David had literally dropped what he had been carrying, a thankfully empty tray, and rushed over to Charlie to help. 

“Cheeks! Shit man, you okay? I have hard time not getting in that bro’s face.” David said, his accent thick but his words mostly in the right order and it made Charlie smile, which caused a sharp pain to shoot through his face from his jaw, and cheekbone. He couldn’t have possibly gotten hit that hard, could he? And had David just called him ‘Cheeks’? His head swam with all of the input at that moment as other people gathered around them, and David’s hand found Charlie’s back as he got him standing and started to lead him back to the breakroom. 

The entire mess was a chaotic blur, leaving Charlie unsure who was talking at what point, and the lights were too bright, and the voices were too loud and he could feel every single syllable in every word shaking through his skull and blooming into a sharp ache at the base of his neck. 

David guided him to the couch in the break room and sat him down, kneeling in front of him to watch carefully. Charlie wasn’t sure exactly what he was doing, just crouched there in front of Charlie with his hands on Charlie’s knees and, with a wavering voice from the sudden burr of panic creeping around his throat Charlie asked, “Pasta, what?” 

He could feel the anxiety bubbling in his chest, raising his heart rate into a dull thud that reverberated in his ears, and making each breath feel like needles. David looked at him like this sometimes, and it always caused a strange ballooning feeling in his chest, as if his lungs were inflating and might burst out of his rib cage. When it was directed at him in this situation, he couldn’t tell what to make of it. 

David watched him carefully and spoke. 

“I need you to follow my finger. Eyes only.” He said seriously. 

Charlie attempted a nod which left him visibly wincing, and an involuntary broken sound escaping his throat. He had never felt something quite like this, not since he was at college, playing hockey and doing his level best to make it to the NHL. That hadn’t happened. One bad hit had left him with such a severe concussion, and lasting concussion syndrome, that his career had been done. Not just his hockey career, but his schooling career. He’d thrown himself into the restaurant then, something that he instinctively knew how to do after always having been around it. 

It had helped him to recover, but now that he was watching David’s finger, he realized what was happening. He had been hit again. Knocked to the ground, and caught right in the face with the hard plastic of a server’s tray. It had been hard enough that the sound of the restaurant still rang uncomfortably in his ears, and trying to follow David’s finger with just his eyes sent a live wire from behind them into his jaw and teeth. It kind of felt like what happens when you chew aluminum foil, but in reverse, and Charlie kind of laughed at himself at that thought. 

He hadn’t even registered that David was talking to him and urging him to stand again until his shirt sleeve was being pulled on. He stood, knees shaking and his hands grabbing for David’s arms as he pitched forward. He could still feel the electric ache where the tray had hit him, he could taste blood in his mouth, and all he could focus on was the way David’s hands framed his waist and held him steady. 

“Gonna bring you home. Get you set up, and stay. You have concussion, and can’t sleep tonight. Gonna have to take you in tomorrow for xray.” David mumbled, low and concerned, his eyes scanning Charlie’s face as he took a tentative step away, hands remaining where they were so he could guide a weakly protesting Charlie out of the building. He walked on as if he didn’t hear a single thing the other was saying, and he looked at him curiously. “Cheeks, my man, I am not letting you go home alone tonight. Not like that. You will need to be watched.” He explained, slowly, almost as if he was talking to a child. It caused Charlie to jam an elbow into David’s ribs and mutter darkly about people who thought the were “so cool that they could just walk in and do whatever they wanted.” 

After the short car ride from the restaurant that had left Charlie spilling his guts into the plastic bag David handed him expressly for that cause, he stumbled out of the car without help and shook off David’s hand. 

He didn’t need help. He was fine. 

He wasn’t fine. He knew he wasn’t fine. The flashbacks to the concussion that had completely altered his life wouldn’t stop, and the stabbing in his ribcage with every breath was a clear sign of an impending panic attack. 

David didn’t know about any of that, didn’t know that it had taken years for Charlie to be able to even drive a car again on his own, let alone to be able to work at the restaurant. The post concussion syndrome had left him with migraines, and every so often small seizures, and it hadn’t been safe for him to be around the restaurant. 

The fact that he couldn’t fucking breathe, that David had only known him since he was 19 and he had to recover as quietly as possible to not set off anyone’s suspicions about what might be a lasting disability… All of it was like a crushing weight across his shoulders, and a vice grip around his ribs. It was like everything was suddenly distant, and he wasn’t actually in the here and now anymore. 

He was vaguely aware of what was going on, caught the hurt look David had given him that changed to determination as he took Charlie’s hand and brought him up into his apartment above his parents’ garage. 

Trying to focus on his breathing was leaving him dizzy, and he let himself slump into the other man bonelessly while they walked. The only thing on him that seemed to be working properly were his legs that trudged along dutifully, as if they knew what Charlie really wanted. His natural inclination was to do whatever it was that would make David stop looking at him like he was some hurt animal that might lash out at any moment, and he squeezed David’s hand delicately as David unlocked his door and lead him inside. 

The inside of the apartment was a disaster area. It was really not his fault, just that the space was small and he had a tendency of leaving things where he thought they would be most useful, or leaving them wherever they were when he decided to put them down. Not much thought really went into Charlie’s planning, was the thing, and he wasn’t even embarrassed by it anymore. He’d spent enough time at David’s to know that the other wasn’t any different from him, and he sometimes wondered if that was a universal experience for people his age. 

His thoughts kept flittering around his brain without much of a filter, landing on the feel of David’s hand in his, the way David’s eyes gave away just how concerned he was, crinkled at their edges as if he was trying to keep himself from frowning or crying. Why would he be crying? 

They had spent a lot of time together over the years, and David was one of his best friends, and as he settled on the couch next to him, he let his head loll back and to the side to rest against his shoulder. They still hadn’t separated their hands, but he thought that maybe it was because David was worried about if he was going to be okay or not. 

Maybe David did know about the TBI. Maybe he knew and that was why he was clutching to Charlie’s hand, with his other tracing shapes over Charlie’s forearm. It was so pleasant, and warm, that Charlie felt himself being dragged slowly under the warm blanket of unconsciousness. Sleep would be so good, it would honestly make everything feel so much better, he was sure of it. 

The startle of the jostling that came from David made Charlie’s eyes blink open slowly, and he looked up at the other curiously. 

“You can’t sleep, Cheeks, you gotta keep awake. Concussion, can’t sleep… We’ll check in the morning. See if it’s better.” He said, his bottom lip stuck between his teeth at the end as he clearly worried about what Charlie’s reaction was going to be. David didn’t like upsetting Charlie, and he knew that Charlie was generally more high strung than he was. It was something he respected. He was good at keeping things on task at work, and he was good at keeping David in check when they hung out outside of work. All in all, David had always thought their friendship had gone well from the beginning, and that there had always been just that slight much more. Charlie knew that, he’d told him as much once night when they’d been drinking to celebrate a birthday Charlie hadn’t wanted to spend with anyone else. It honestly left David so lost, when he thought about what Charlie hadn’t even realized yet. He had no way to make it move obvious, without outright discussing it and that seemed like a hurdle that might actually spook Charlie away from him. 

“Why d’you keep callin’ me Cheeks?” Charlie asked, snuggling to David’s side, and David laughed a startled laugh and reached a hand up slowly to pinch at Charlie’s right cheek. 

“‘Cause your cheeks, are like, the… um. They’re great. Cutest.” He stumbled over his words in a way that Charlie had never seen him do, and it took several moments pause for them to process their way through Charlie’s brain. He raised his eyebrows, head tilted and lips parted as his breathing finally slowed to something manageable and comfortable. 

“My cheeks are the cutest, huh?” He asked as a smile broke across his face, shining like the early morning sun across the ocean. It reflected in his eyes, and he knew he was concussed, he did, and thinking was hard, but this was something he at least had known he felt for… longer than he’d care to admit. Hearing that David thought he was cute was like a salve to that piece of his mind that had half convinced him nothing would ever happen. 

David, never one to blush or shy away from things like this, nodded his head with a smile and let Charlie’s hand go to tuck his arm around Charlie instead. 

“We’ll talk later. When head isn’t so bad, yeah? Gotta work this out the best way we can… I’m not going anywhere.” He reassured Charlie, somehow knowing, maybe reading in the panicked look on Charlie’s face, that Charlie was terrified this was something that wasn’t real. David knew how real it was and he rubbed his hand at Charlie’s back. 

“We’ll talk about it in the morning. But. I’m in this. Have been.” He continued, trying to express more clearly to the younger man just how serious he was about this. Charlie nodded then, and smiled up at David. 

“Okay, Pasta. Talk in the morning.” He said, and knew things would work out from there. 

Things were going to be okay. All of those feelings that he’d pushed to the back of his mind were reciprocated by the way David was looking at him. 

This was going to be okay.


End file.
